It has emerged that a US public relations firm, Racepoint , was being paid $50k a month by the government of Rwanda to improve its image, at a time when rights groups were increasingly critical of the crackdown on dissent in the country. The contract was far from unusual, with many despotic regimes now turning to UK and US firms to ‘massage’ their images.

Ethiopia – Spent more than $2.5m on three US firms in 2007/8. Government known for arresting opposition members, while Menes Zenawi has ruled for 21 years.

Equatorial Guinea – Government of Teodoro Obiang, in power for 32 years, hired Qorvis Communications for $60k a month. In one of the world’s poorest countries, Obiang has a fortune estimated at $600m.

Angola – Spending $675,000 annually to improve its image. Autocrat Jose Eduardo dos Santos has ruled the country for 32 years.

Racepoint’s agreement with the government of Rwanda:

Once we have secured agenda-setting stories in the general political and business media, we will propagate the story on the Web…Eventually this will have the effect of drowning out the opposition and reducing the incidence of genocide-related search dominating the organic search (on the Internet).

About

ReadSheet aims to curate the very best writing from around the web, filtering the noise while highlighting insightful, well-written or just purely interesting journalism.
For the best experience try using this site with a read it later service such as Pocket, Instapaper or Readability. For Kindle users why not try out the Send to Kindle browser extension.
For content suggestions or anything else, please get in touch here.

Weekend Reads

Enter your email to get the five best feature-length reads of the week sent straight to your inbox, every Sunday morning.